GoPro, Founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman is surrounded by dozens of variations of his GoPro cameras that are used by both pro and amateur photographers specializing is sports and recreation photography at his Half Moon Bay office Wednesday May, 4, 2011

On Wednesday afternoon, I found myself in a heavy leather racing suit on the back of a motorcycle zipping around Sonoma Raceway.

Earlier in the day, an instructor had described the 2.5-mile track with 12 twists as "a bit of a doozy." It felt like incredible understatement as racing champion Jason Pridmore leaned deeply into the "U" that is turn 11.

Had I scratched my right ear at that instant, I'm fairly sure my elbow would have scraped the ground. And if the GoPro camera mounted on the handlebar had caught my expression behind the helmet shield, the footage would have shown me bravely keeping the terror at bay by squeezing my eyes shut.

How did I find myself in this situation?

Because the officials at GoPro, the fast-growing company behind the popular line of wearable and mountable video cameras, are marketing masterminds.

On Tuesday night, the 10-year-old San Mateo company announced its latest camera, the Hero3. The camera is 30 percent smaller, 20 percent lighter and two times as powerful as its predecessor, said GoPro Chief Executive Officer Nicholas Woodman onstage in San Francisco.

The $400 top-line version, dubbed the Black Edition, is capable of shooting at up to 4K resolution - known as ultra-high-definition. When set to 720p, the low end for HD, the camera can shoot at 120 frames per second, enabling ultra-slow motion without distortion.

But it's one thing to read off specs to a roomful of reporters. It's another thing entirely to hand them the new toy and take them out on a day of "adventures" to showcase what it can do. That's precisely what the company did - loading up three buses destined for different activities - knowing full well that most of the journalists would share the camera's capabilities with their audiences.

One set took off in jets out of Byron. Another got to scuba dive with sharks at the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco. My group headed to Sonoma, where we were allowed to drive Audi R8s around the course, sit within feet of a drift car demonstration and, as I've mentioned, ride on the back of a speeding motorcycle.

Enlisting journalists

In effect, GoPro had enlisted journalists in its marketing efforts. It's a role I'd be more uncomfortable in except for one thing: The company has created legitimately impressive cameras. I bought the first HD Hero almost two years ago and have used it extensively in travel videos and other projects I produced for SFGate.

It's not that GoPro puts out the best video cameras on the market, it's that the products are incredibly portable and versatile. Thanks to a variety of mounts and cases, they can be attached to cars, snowboards, helmets, bikes and ski poles, capturing points of view that could rarely be seen before - like up-close expressions of snowboarders in mid-McTwist.

GoPro was born in 2002, when Woodman, a surf enthusiast, created nothing more complicated than a wrist strap that allowed surfers to capture their buddies on the water without fear of losing their cameras to the sea. Eventually the company began to develop their own still cameras. But sales really took off in 2009, after the company launched its first HD video camera.

But eventually, doctors hoping to record surgeries and families wanting to capture their children's firsts took up the cameras too, Woodman said Tuesday.

"The world was full of people just like surfers who had no means to document the things they're passionate about," he said. "It was enabling people to self-document their life experiences and share it with others in a way they never could before."

That, in effect, turned the company's customers into marketers as well.

YouTube popularity

On the bus ride up to Sonoma, I happened to sit with Todd Ballard, director of sports marketing. He mentioned that a video tagged "GoPro" is uploaded to YouTube roughly once every two minutes.

"The users do the marketing for us," he said.

I asked why other camera companies haven't had the same luck. After all, GoPro hardly has the field to itself anymore. Companies like Vivitar, Drift, iON, Contour and even Sony have come out with offerings with similar specs - often at lower prices.

"We created the category," Ballard said.

That plus the company's roots in surfing earned early goodwill and a reputation of "authenticity" within the insular worlds of extreme sports. It means they can just as easily move cameras in skate shops or Best Buy, which can't be said of many products.

But Ballard readily acknowledged this could be easily lost if the company takes on a whiff of corporate culture as it grows. And that's an ever present threat. The company doubled in size from a year ago, reaching around 320 employees. That forced GoPro to recently relocate from its Half Moon Bay headquarters near the surf to suburban San Mateo.

$250 million

IDC estimates that GoPro brought in $250 million in revenue last year. In July, Reuters reported that the company is planning to go public next year in an offering worth up to a half billion dollars, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Spiraling employee counts and fickle shareholders have a way of shifting a company's culture and priorities.

GoPro's other challenge will be to continue to deliver products that outpace their peers - while giving existing customers adequate reason to upgrade. On that score, at least, they delivered with the Hero3.

To be sure, there are some early bugs the company is still working out. By the time we arrived in Sonoma on Wednesday morning, they already had a firmware upgrade to load onto the cameras. Even after that, the Hero3 I was using kept locking up every time I tried to turn off the viewfinder.

But the image quality is vastly improved, at least compared with the two generation-old Hero I brought along to compare footage (see the results at: blog.sfgate.com/techchron/)

The resolution is noticeably higher and the colors are much truer and richer. In addition, the high frame rate options enable smooth and clear slow-motion effects, so you can perfectly capture those expressions of pure joy - or sheer dread.